Above is excerpt from a recent Ignite Club call where we reviewed how to export your contact data (and other data) from Linkedin.

One quick note – LinkedIn often changes things, so depending when you are viewing this, things may look a little different. If that happens, drop me a comment and I’ll do my best to update the video.

Downloading your LinkedIn data (overview)

• Getting a copy of your data for
  • Backups
  • Importing into other programs like CRM
• Request Data
  • Click on Profile Pick
  • Settings and Privacy
  • Scroll down to “How LinkedIn uses your data”
  • Click “Download your data”
  • Select the data sets you want
  • Wait for email from LinkedIn telling you your download is ready. Click link in the email
  • Download zip file containing 1 or more .csv files
  • Open with Excel, or import into CRM etc.

Transcript

Click on your little profile picture right here, and you want to go to settings and privacy, and then you wanna scroll down. You want to make sure you’re on this privacy tab, and then you want to scroll down to how LinkedIn uses your data, and you want to download your data.

And then when you get here, hopefully you can see this okay, but … Let me see if I can get this. But anyways, so you can either say give me everything, or you can pick and choose where you can download anything that you might have up there. So most people want their connections. This imported contacts, just that’s if you wanted to … if you’ve imported from other sources into Linkedin, and now you wanna just get a copy of those out, you can do that.

There’s certainly a case where you might want all of these, but most of the time people just want their connections. And so, what you do is you just click this request archive, and I’m not Gonna do it yet because it makes the screen harder to read. But basically, what it’ll say is you’ll request it. This will change to, say, you’ll get an email when it’s ready. You can see it’s tell me it’s gonna take about 10 minutes. And then, this will be grayed out. I think it says pending or something like that.

In about 10 or 15 minutes, what’ll happens is you will get an email that’ll say your data’s ready, and it’ll have a link in it. And when you click on that link it’s gonna take you right back to this page, except now this blue button is gonna say download. And so, you click download and it’s gonna save your file to your computer. And it saves it, I think, almost always in a zip file. And so, and just gonna go to wherever your downloads are. So …

And then, inside the zip file … So if you were to pick … Let’s say you picked all of these. Then you would have a file for each one of these items in that archive. Since I said connections, my zip file should just have one file and it will be a .csv, which stands for comma separated values, and that’s the default file type. Whoops, let me get back to the right place. That’s the default file type that most programs use for importing. And so, trying to see if I had … We have this .csv is what you’ll have. And then, if you have Excel, if you have Excel on your … installed on your machine, the csv will have the little Excel-type of icon on it, but you should be able to open it in that. I know I’ve opened it in Google Sheets. I’m sure you Apple folks, you’re … if you have a different spreadsheet file, you can probably open that up.

But basically, anyway, that’ll be your … that’ll be your backup and you can do with it what you need to do. The only other thing I’ll say is that if you’re importing it into something like your CRM, you wanna check with that software first. A lot of times there’s a process where you … there’s a mapping process where you have to tell the program that you’re pulling the data into, you have to say, “This field called,” let’s say first name. So this field called First Name in my CRM is called F-Name in my import file or something like that. So basically, you just have to do this mapping that says this is how you know to pull what data from where because Linkedin will call things the same and it won’t put them in the same order, so you just have to tell your program how to do an import, and that’s a little different for every program. I’ve had, fortunately or unfortunately, I’ve had a lot of opportunity to work with those, so if you have any questions about that feel free to give me a call, or send me an email and I’m happy to help you.

And again, I’m sorry. I should have said this upfront for those of you that are new, I will put this little outline with my notes in it in with the recording inside the Ignite Club website, so I think that pretty much covers that. So if you have a question, shoot it … go ahead and shoot it to me there in the questions section, and see …